Wright | 2021 | UK & USA

3rd watch. A film I’ve gone all the way around the world with. I really didn’t care for it the first time. I don’t have notes from that viewing but l remember feeling like there was a good movie in here that was never quite drawn out; interesting parts that failed to make a cohesive whole. The second viewing a few months later uncovered nothing new, though I recall finding it more palatable. Flash forward 3.5 years and something about this movie just continued to gnaw at me so down I sat and, well, I more or less love it now. The Girl will call it “A Classic Greg Move”.

The boundary between this and that – between here and somewhere else – is so thin as to be transparent. David Lynch would remind us that the truth is just in the next room (if only we could get into that room). The passageways between here and there which the film conveys are never explained to the audience and it finally occurred to me that they don’t need to be. There is a door – a threshold – and that is all we need to know.

It may also be true that if we possess the ability and willingness to cross these thresholds, we will do so through portals as commonplace as music and at locations in space and time to which we are drawn with a force equal to our interest in them. The tuning fork indicates a straightforward path but that path can lead to madness if navigated with naiveté.

And that, more or less, is what this film captures (if imperfectly). The glittering allure of fantasy slips blinders on our eyes as we follow the road and we may find ourselves consumed not only by our own madness, but also by the haunted and sinister madness of others. We might be admiring the reflection in the mirror; we might be the reflection.

Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy are sublime as the two sides of a psycho-tragic coin. Although this film would probably like for you to think it’s horror, there’s little here that is scary in the traditional sense. What is truly haunting is the idea that these cycles of tragedy – dreaming and falling (under the weight of exploitation) – continue to occur. If Eloise and Sandie are two sides of a coin, it is a coin that continues to flip.

4K digital at home.

Trachtenberg | 2025 | USA

I was skeptical that this would be interesting to me. Inverting the narrative perspective of a Predator film from the prey to the predator seemed like it would rather defeat the purpose. To go one step further and give a ‘predator’ a hero’s journey seemed patently silly. But one of the hills I will always be happy to die on is that the phenomenological refrain that we must return to “the things themselves” is as true in film as in life. This is just a movie doing its own thing, and I’m just watching. Happily, this is one of the times I was rewarded for taking a film on its own terms.

Elle Fanning is really rather wonderful in the dual roles of Thia and Tessa. I do tend to enjoy when a villain isn’t evil for evil’s sake. Having one “sister” parading through the film with demonstrative power is a nifty narrative trick that allows you to buy everything that happens in the third act; that disembodied legs can be hilarious AND a killing machine.

Frankly, I regret not seeing this in cinemas. Some of the visuals are incredible. Craft is foregrounded, and it pays off. Competency gets you pretty far these days.

Streamed at home.

Beck & Woods | 2024 | USA

2nd watch – and on the couch with The Girl, a rare treat in our parenting era. This didn’t blow me away the first time but only because I’ve seen too many movies and it ended up being exactly what I thought it would be. Still, one enjoys the Active Ingredient of one’s medicine and in this instance it’s Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East. Never have you seen two faces do this much work – the joy, confusion, terror, anger, and sadness is masterfully rendered in so many tiny mouth movements, wrinkled eyebrows, and motionless eyeballs. It’s really pretty incredible.

I realised part of the way through that this film is a very good piece of submissable evidence in the case I’m always making that you’ll have more fun at the movies if you never assume the movie is set in “our world”. It might look like our world (a nifty trick to effortlessly make you understand the stakes, among other things) but it’s not. It’s kind of the inverse of the idea that characters do not know what genre they’re in (hence they behave irrationally in, e.g., a horror film).

It would be tempting to wonder many practical things about Hugh Grant’s character, for example, but the answers become irrelevant when you remember you can’t judge him based on the rules of our reality. Trust me, it’s better.

Linklater | 2025 | France & USA

Pour moi, this was a romp. I have some awareness that if you don’t have a preexisting relationship with À bout de souffle, this would be hard to get excited about. But as somebody who went out of his way in Paris to walk the street where Godard filmed the last sequence of that film, not geeking out at the reimagined behind-the-scenes wasn’t an option for me.

The simple joy to be had here is that of watching somebody’s love letter to a film (and historical moment) of which you are also fond. I’ve seen it called a “hangout movie” but if that’s the case, it’s À bout de souffle itself that I enjoyed hanging out with.

The performances are wonderful, executed with a profound tenderness for the beloved figures being portrayed (while never settling for mimicry). It’s one for the film nerds, made by film nerds. Unable to view it as anything but, I found it rather joyful.

Digital rental at home.

[The Great Arch]
Demoustier | 2025 | France

Something about doing a PhD focused on design thinking has turned me into a soft touch for all matters of design (which permeate all of life – la vie – of course). Stories about ‘visionary’ designers have a tendency of either obfuscating the relationship between a design and the self of the designer or leaning so hard into that relationship that the design process comes off as something like magic. There is no magic in design but there is absolutely a nonzero amount of the designer, no matter how untraceable or ineffable the link.

What this film does exceptionally well is refuse to separate design and designer. Indeed, this inextricability is the very heart of the plot. [French] bureaucracy is played for dark but knowing laughs and dodgy actors on the periphery infuse tension into the proceedings but, at the end of the day, this is a story about somebody who did a thing and refused to compromise.

On a personal level, this film highlighted a few shifts in my thinking that have come on in middle age. Specifically, the value of a life and how it’s constructed. Not so long ago, I probably would have found this a rather dreary and uninspiring story of somebody who couldn’t beat the system. Moments that are inarguably heroic would have been interpreted as sad or bleak. Fortunately, I’ve come to recognise agency as perhaps the primary goal in life. A life well lived is a life lived the way you’d care to live it. In this way, such a life is the quintessential design.

French Film Festival at The Kino.

Parker | 1982 | UK

2nd viewing; 1st in cinema. And it’s been at least 20 years since that first watch, because apparently now I’m old enough to talk about time in decades instead of years. Over those two decades, the importance of this album has only grown in my mind – it is well and truly a favourite, and it resonates differently with every life threshold I cross (most recently: becoming a father to a son).

The father-son thread is laced through the album, of course, but is explicitly (if not confrontingly) foregrounded in the film. A bit much for me at a random Wednesday matinee screening, but we make do.

Simply put: this is sublime. Close-up photography highlights the grotesqueries of life, animated segments take you through the looking glass of abstraction and out the other side, and the narrative steps forward to be admired in all of its glory. Truly a tremendous 100 minutes. I shan’t go 20 years before watching it again (hell: I’d go again tomorrow).

[A Tale of Winter]
Rohmer | 1991 | France

3rd watch; 2nd in cinema. A slight disruption to my year of watching Rohmer’s four seasons cycle as each season starts – I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to show this to The Girl on the big screen. And it will be no big ask to watch this again in a few months when winter begins, as all of Rohmer’s films are endlessly rewatchable, revealing themselves anew each time you check in with one. For example, this revisit allowed me appreciate the subtle depth and grace of Véry’s lead performance – truly the driving force of the film.

As with any Rohmer film, characters do be talking. In less capable and empathetic hands, constant discussion of thoughts and feelings (and frequently their philosophical underpinnings) would keep everything a little too textual. Rohmer manages to avoid crossing this line by recognising the utility of oral discourse to *his characters* as opposed to us, the audience. We are merely flies on the wall as characters talk each other (or, more often, themselves) into and out of things.

The final line of this film is my favourite final line of any film, made all the more powerful because (a) it is an echo of another character speaking the same phrase only moments before and (b) it is also (canonically) the final line of the four seasons cycle, Rohmer’s last thematic sequence of films. I shan’t spoil it, but it also describes the emotions of one who loves his films when they arrive at this dual ending.

Neville | 2025 | USA, UK

There is an essential tension (if not absurdity) about Paul McCartney, and this doco comes pretty close to meaningful insight in exploring that tension. Here we have a guy – and I do mean “a guy” rather literally – who wants to be the only thing he can never be: somebody without ‘former Beatle’ on their CV. The doco at hand unrolls his navigation of the 70s and the formation and [unofficial] dissolution of Wings, and makes much of his desire for Wings to be a group of equals. But of course, this could never be.

The very interesting question that arises on the back of this notion is: would anybody care about Wings at all if this were not the case – if the band were just any group of musicians and not one led by Sir Paul? It’s easy to point to their successes, the greatest of which was the album Band on the Run, and just as easy to forget this was not their debut effort – how many bands not led by former Beatles ever get a second crack after a first album that was dismissed by critics? Or, take a different tack: would the critical reception of the first Wings album have been so harsh had people not wanted them to be The Beatles: Mark II?

This film at least asks these questions, without ever really answering them. But that exploration, punctuated with reflections on life on ‘the farm’ and Paul’s marriage to Linda, was more than enough for me. One walks away immediately wanting to put on one of his albums (I chose McCartney II) and wanting to move to a sheep farm. Increasingly, it is McCartney’s efforts to lead something like a simple life that are the most endearing to me.

Fennell | 2026 | USA, UK

Pretty [boring].

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That said, a flavour of take I continue to see about Wuthering Heights concerns the “accuracy” or “respect” of the adaptation. One formed and shared in particularly bad faith called it “anti-intellectual” and “dangerous”.

Movies are movies and books are books. Even when a book is adapted “faithfully” and both book and film are excellent (The Martian and 25th Hour spring to mind), they are still separate quantities and there’s nothing in the link.

Next month I’ll get to see an adaptation of my favourite writer’s (Camus) most popular novel (The Stranger). I won’t be able to unread the novel and that knowledge of the story will be on my mind as I watch the film – but it’s not knowledge I’ll hold against the film. Otherwise, what would be the point of even watching the film?

[A Tale of Summer]
Rohmer | 1996 | France

2nd watch. 2026 begins with me continuing my quest to re-watch Rohmer’s Four Seasons cycle in line with the “real life” seasons. This might just be the walkiest and talkiest of all the walk and talk stories out there (a compliment). Dinard, St Malo, and St Lunaire provide stunning backdrops for said walking and talking – one can almost convince oneself they are themselves on holiday. I appreciated the foibles of our hero, Gaspard, a lot more this time around. A deceptively simple plot plays almost as an essay on indecision and self delusion, rendering the resolution, as it were, hilarious for its appropriateness.